Heroes and Misfits: The Troubled Social Reintegration of Disabled Veterans in "The Best Years of Our Lives"

s him from the workaday social world. People with disabilities increasingly have come to recognize this constricted conception of the disabled a fundamental source of their oppression.44 Of course, if one finds Homer's response to his handlessness plausible, such criticism seems a hopeless case of substituting a contemporary, ideologically driven viewpoint for the complexity of the real of the mid-1940s Wyler had hoped to capture. How then are This content downloaded from 157.55.39.181 on Thu, 29 Sep 2016 06:10:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms HEROES AND MISFITS 567 we to understand disabled veterans? Must Philoctetes's bitter, selfpitying, suffering alienation be our only working model? In responding to the question, we may benefit from comparing Harold Russell's postinjury experiences to Homer's story. In his two memoirs, Russell writes that while recovering in the hospital and then during his months of rehabilitation, he was hardly immune from depression, hopelessness, and self-pity. Yet he also took practical steps to remake his life and, in doing so, vastly boosted his self-confidence. Within months of his accident, he resumed a love affair with one woman and then became engaged to another he had been too shy to pursue before the war. He applied successfully to Boston University's Business School, where he wanted to get training in public relations. The choice of career was premised on Russell's realization, based on countless public encounters, that if he could make strangers comfortable with his hooks, he could sell them anything. Even the crucial bedroom scene-one we want so much to believe because it creates such a powerful, cleansing emotional catharsis-was premised on a falsehood, one just misleading the assumption that disabled men like Russell were sexually passive. One of the first things Russell learned in rehabilitation was to put on and remove his hooks by himself, precisely so that he would never be as dependent a baby.45 To a large extent, therefore, Homer became Homer in spite of, rather than because of, the emotional profile of the man employed to play him. Russell accepted the logic of the script he was given, dredged up appropriate emotions based on memory but also imagination, and was carried along he discovered that he enjoyed acting. An interviewer who assumes that he and Homer were the same person will find that Russell carefully differentiates between the character he played and the man he was in 1945.46 Wyler came to understand this. During production, he grew so impatient with Russell's problems portraying anger, confusion, and passivity that he actually threatened to require Russell spend two weeks at a military hospital, where it was assumed that soon he would become bitter and miserable.47 Of course, the audience knew none of this. Having no opportunity to distinguish between Homer Parrish and Harold Russell, the audience could not be effectively challenged in its limited imaginative response, pity and fear, toward disability. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.181 on Thu, 29 Sep 2016 06:10:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 568 AMERICAN QUARTERLY